The Roster

The subsistence-allowance roster of Willow Village is posted once every twelfth month on the faded green notice board by the village office. The glass is split by three cracks, mended with yellow tape, and when the wind blows the paper trembles inside the splits.

The first time Fusheng went to look at that red sheet was four years ago. That year Caifeng collapsed at the kitchen stove; the clinic found a clot in her brain. She was saved, but half her body stopped obeying her. Fusheng sold the two pigs and borrowed two thousand from his elder brother to get her off the bed and moving. The house was empty, and the fields could no longer be worked, for his own back was wrenched, he could not carry water, he could not bend at the waist.

He went to see Secretary Liu. Secretary Liu, called Liu Degui, sat in the swivel chair of the village office, a glass of goji berries forever steeped on his desk. Fusheng stated his errand. The secretary said, "Fusheng, the allowance is life-saving money, the quotas are tight, the village must put the most desperate first. Fill the form, wait for the review." The form was filled, the review attended. Fusheng sat at the back and listened as each family's hardships were read out. When his turn came, the secretary said, "Fusheng's son Xiaojun works away in the city, surely he will provide? This quota, give it to the bachelor Ershunzi, a man with no one even to talk to." Ershunzi, in fact, crouched at the secretary's door handing out cigarettes every day.

Fusheng said nothing. He did not understand what the review was, only felt something was wrong and could not name it.

The second year, Caifeng's bedsores festered to the size of an egg. Fusheng washed them with salt water and padded them with old cloth. He heard there was a good powder at the county town, eighteen yuan a box, and would not spend it. The third year he sold the remaining half-mu of corn and the laying speckled hen to get some medicine from the clinic. Xiaojun came home for the new year and pressed five hundred yuan into his father's hand, saying the factory was hard up too and could not send more. He left on the fifth day.

The allowance roster went up the second year, and Fusheng's name was still not on it. Upon it was the secretary's widowed cousin, newly so, who had raised a two-storey house the year before; Manchang, who drove a three-wheel cart and had, they said, delivered a load of coal to the secretary's home; and Ershunzi. Fusheng stood before the board, his fingers picking at the yellow tape, which had long since stuck fast and would not budge.

For the first time the thought came to him, and he went to Old Gen at the east end of the village. Old Gen said, "You fool, those others all meant it. If you do not mean it, does the quota ever reach you?" Fusheng asked what meaning it meant. Old Gen only laughed and said no more.

That winter solstice, Fusheng carried a basket of farm eggs, a bottle of loose white liquor pressed into its bottom, and went to Secretary Liu's home in the dark. The secretary opened the door, glanced at the basket, and laughed. "Fusheng, what are you doing, take it back." Yet his hands had already taken the basket. He said, "Next year. Next year I will surely put you on."

Fusheng returned home. Caifeng lay crooked on the bed, her eyes following him around. Her tongue would not obey; she could only make sounds of ah, ah. Fusheng suddenly felt she understood everything.

The twelfth month of the next year, the red sheet went up again. Fusheng did not go to the village office. Xiaojun called and asked why his father had grown so thin. Fusheng said he was fine. The egg basket and the bottle of liquor, he swallowed them down.

The third year, Fusheng learned. When the secretary's daughter married, he sealed the thickest red envelope; when the secretary built a cow shed, he hauled bricks for three days without pay. He no longer walked with his head bent, and learned to smile at the table. Caifeng's bedsores healed and broke, broke and healed. Fusheng could now afford the eighteen-yuan powder, not because of the allowance, but because he had learned something else.

When the year-end roster came out, Fusheng's name was still absent. But this time he did not go to pick at the yellow tape. He stood on the dirt road outside the village office, watching other families' fireworks burst in the twelfth month, and thought: so this list was never kept for the most desperate.

In spring the board's glass broke clean through, the red paper soaked by rain into a pulp, and no one replaced it. Fusheng passed that way and did not look once. The days of Willow Village went on as before, whose grandson was born, whose roof fell in, none of it having anything to do with that torn paper. Only, from that year on, no one in the village ever went to ask how the allowance ought to be judged.